Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/50

proposed, for which I am in a measure responsible, have perhaps not carried on their face the recommendations of general or popular interest; and Foreign History does not of course receive so much attention as English History. But none of these is a satisfactory reason. The view which I have every reason to believe that the founder of the Lothian Prize had before him was not merely to stimulate historical reading but really to help to increase the stores of historical knowledge by the production of valuable monographs on points of foreign history. My own idea of what we should look for is something like the small but most valuable dissertations which are produced in some of the German Universities as exercises for the doctorate. These are the work of men of twenty-three or twenty-four, just the age at which our high-class men graduate; and they are the result of their private reading, approved and authorised, so to speak, by their professors. Within the last few weeks I have received two such essays on subjects mainly of English interest, in fact upon portions of our history which I myself have treated: a tract on the 'Dialogus de Scaccario,' by Mr. Liebermann, of Göttingen; and one on the capture of Lisbon by the English crusaders in 1 147, by Mr. Cosack, of the University of Halle. I mention these not because I have any credit to claim for them, for I am criticised quite as calmly and unsparingly as any other Englishman may expect to be in German reviews, but because I take them to be a sign of a sort of literary culture which we ought not to be ashamed to imitate. Unlike most of our ordinary historic reviews, they have a permanent value: they are not condemned, as some very good English work of the kind is, to be the padding of popular magazines,— the ever uncut leaves that interpose between the two sensational stories by which the magazine lives,— but they are put together and stored up for the days when either the writers or some who have profited by the reading of them can use them in more continuous, more consolidated, work. Now it is useless to argue that we cannot do this. Mr. Dicey's Essay on the Privy Council, which took the Arnold Prize in 1860, is a proof that our prize system is